Familiar sorrow betrays our national shame

“This is a time of shame and sorrow,” said United States Democratic leadership candidate Bobby Kennedy on April 5, 1968, speaking to both a singular act of murderous hatred and to the caldron of racist bile from which it sprang.

A week ago, a singular act of murderous hatred shocked Canadians and engulfed us in heart-wrenching sorrow for a family destroyed while simply out for an evening stroll in their hometown of London, Ont.

As every Canadian should know by now, the Afzaal family was Muslim. They’re murderer is a 20-year-old white man who turned his pickup truck into a deadly weapon, and whose only motive seems a mad hatred of Islam, a religion he almost certainly knows nothing about.

Our sorrow deepened as we thought of the lone survivor. Nine-year old Fayez was seriously injured in the attack, but injuries will heal. The wounds inflicted by the senseless killing of his mother, his father, his sister and his grandmother never will.

We recognize our sorrow. It’s familiar and that familiarity betrays our shame. This has happened before.

DISMAL RESPONSE

Our dismal national response to this kind of violent hatred is evident by how little we’ve done to root out Islamophobia since the last horrific attack. In 2017, at a Quebec mosque, a white supremacist shot and killed six Muslim men and wounded another 19 worshippers at evening prayer.

It took almost four years of effort from the Canadian Muslim community before the federal government named Jan. 29 — the day of the mosque massacre — a National Day of Remembrance for the victims.

Even that gesture was opposed by Quebec Premier François Legault, who was wilfully blind to the malevolence in his midst, claiming there was “no Islamophobia in Québec.” Statistics Canada found that hate crimes against Muslims in Quebec tripled between 2016 and 2017, from 41 to 117.

We are collectively horrified by the discovery, just weeks ago, of 215 unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

But that’s part of our troubled past, we tell ourselves. It is our forebears’ shame.

And so it is. But ours is that we’ve tolerated, in our institutions and in our society, a similar strain of the white supremacy to that which produced residential schools. That’s the belief that white people — and Christians — are the norm, resulting in the marginalization of “others.”

As almost any racialized Canadian can tell you, bigotry and hatred against people of colour and “others” remains prevalent in our self-proclaimed multicultural society.

NO LONGER HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

For a time, the bigots and white supremacists hid in plain sight. We didn’t see them because we were afraid to look. Meanwhile, hate did what hate always does. It festered and fed on itself. It’s doing that at this very moment, aided and abetted by the reach of the internet.

Coincidental with the lurch to the intolerant far-right in the U.S. and other western nations, the haters here and elsewhere were emboldened and they climbed out of their holes.

We couldn’t help but see them now, but what did we do about it? Not a whole lot.

A few short years ago, members of the Proud Boys, a neofascist, far-right, racist and chauvinist organization were accepted in the Canadian Navy. Recently, the acting head of Canada’s forces, Wayne Eyre, conceded that there’s a culture that permits racism, discrimination, harassment and sexual misconduct in Canada’s military.

His recognition of the sick culture is a step in the right direction. We await action to remove the malignancy.

Whether the forces reflect the nation, or attract a disproportionate number of racists, seems almost irrelevant.

‘WE MUST ACT’

The fact is that in Canada, as elsewhere, the caldron of racist bile is spitting out violent extremists. American intelligence services say the greatest threat to their nation comes from within — from alt-right, violent white supremacists. The same forces are at work in Canada.

Canadians, on the whole, are not racist, but there’s no denying that racism and religious intolerance are a clear and present danger for too many of our fellow citizens and, as a nation, we’ve done too little to change that.

In that speech on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Kennedy said, “only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”

“The fact is, if we want to change these conditions ... we must act. The fact is that we can act. And the fact is also that we are not acting,” he said.

With a few exceptions, mostly token gestures, that statement seems as true today as it was 53 years ago.